Earlier quoted context omitted.
SF already tried giving homeless people a stipend.
Which has what to do with basic income?
Like a limited-scope version of it
It Is Time For Basic Income
661–670 of 761 posts
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
incomethax already mentioned that this is essentially supplemental insurance. Basic Income is needed because while productivity increases the ownership of these productivity increases are centralizing in the hands of a few. Through system-effects these centralization are leading to further rent seeking than could have happened before. To give an example. It is game theoretically highly likely that there can only be o…
While I agree with you that rent-seekers have more concentrated wealth than us merely overpaid people, I don't know how to voluntarily separate those people from their money.
Tax wealth and capital rather than income. You want to tax gain in capital rather than direct income (just reverse the capital gains and income tax rates, and gains are realised when stock prices go up, rather than when you sell if your stock values are above a certain small number).
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? My proposal is an e-currency with a time based demurrage ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency) ) fee. The demurrage fees would be paid out equally to all consumers. The demurrage fee pay outs would be equivalent to a basic income. Since it is an e-currency, it would be independent of governments. Why would businesses…
There's an altcoin based on time-based demurrage fee called Freicoin[1]. [1] http://freico.in/
I did see this. However, with Freicoin the demurrage fee is only used to pay the miners. In my proposal the fees would be paid back to all consumers.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree with you that rent-seekers have more concentrated wealth than us merely overpaid people, I don't know how to voluntarily separate those people from their money.
Tax wealth and capital rather than income. You want to tax gain in capital rather than direct income (just reverse the capital gains and income tax rates, and gains are realised when stock prices go up, rather than when you sell if your stock values are above a certain small number).
Sounds like 'vat' or something. Very European.
Tax codes don't make sense, because they get diddled every year to meet some Senator's (Lobbyist's) pet purpose. Stir and bake for 100 years, and we have the baroque mess we're in.
As somebody famous said, taxation is the art of 'getting the most feathers from the goose, with the least squawking'. Noting in there about making sense or being fair.
Taxing wealth is similar to the old idea of the property tax, used 100's of years ago to encourage working idle lands in the hands of useless absentee-landlord lords and ladies. Worked pretty good. Maybe its time to do the same for bank accounts, investments etc.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if that trend continues, at some point in the not too distant future, it will become profitable to mine metals from, say, automobile junkyards, instead of from the ground. Or we'll find substitutes, as we already have for many metals (an automobile junkyard a decade from now, containing mostly cars built around this time, won't have nearly as much metal in it because the car bodies will be mostly composite).
You can't make more aluminum just by wanting it. If our usage of aluminum increases, eventually there will not be enough aluminum.
You can't make more aluminum just by wanting it.
No, but if the price goes up enough, you can mine it, as I said, from places like auto junkyards where people have thrown it away.
If our usage of aluminum increases, eventually there will not be enough aluminum.
No, if our usage of aluminum increases, assuming the supply is constant, its price will go up, so people will have incentives to find substitutes. (I already gave one example: using composites instead of metal for car bodies; that mostly substitutes for steel, not aluminum, but it does substitute for some aluminum usage, and the general point is the same.) So the increasing price of aluminum will regulate its usage so that we never run out; we just keep shifting certain uses to substitutes so that aluminum is only needed for uses that are valuable enough to make it worth paying the market price.
This is not just theoretical, by the way; it has happened many, many times. Aluminum itself is an example: most of its uses are uses in which it displaced other metals, like iron and steel (a good example is car engines: most of them are made of aluminum now because it's cheaper than cast iron).
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
a hoarding, power hungry society that uses money as the means to manage the distribution and ownership of things. Actually, I think the problem is that we don't use money enough to manage distribution and ownership; too much distribution and ownership is controlled by factors other than money. But it's true that there is a problem with money as a control mechanism, though it isn't what you appear to think it is: the…
"...is that governments manipulate the money supply for political reasons." That's the power hungry part I'm talking about. The government is not some machine that is broken, it's a select group of people within our society running around trying to balance appeasing the public horde while trying to amass as much power as possible. The behaviour of the people within government is a reflection of the state and quality…
So how would you fix this problem?
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. BJ is work that is not worth doing at current market prices . I.e., picking up garbage in the park might be worth $4/hour, but minimum wage is $7.25/hour. If we spend $7.25 more and get $4.00 worth of value out of it, we lost $3.25. If we are already spending $7.25 on welfare/BI and getting nothing in return, we a…
And how is that different than eliminating a minimum wage and providing a basic income, other that the basic job is much more complex?
I think the idea is that if you already have a basic income, then you probably would not be motivated to work for such low wages.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#668I may be missing something important, but at a glance there are about 140M jobs in the US. If we gave each of the ~320M US citizens $20k/yr, that comes out to roughly $6.4T/year as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. If there are roughly 140M jobs, presumably there are 140M people working those jobs, meaning that there are approximately 140M people who must cover that $6.4T, which works out to be ~$46k/yr for each wo…
The number of variables to account for are far greater than the number of ideas coming from within comments here.
I'll give you just one to try and add to your spreadsheet: When you add a saftey net and provide money to those that, otherwise, would not have it to spend you obviously increase government revenue through new employment and taxation. How would you quantify that increase? I don't think anyone can say, but it would happen and it would be significant.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...is that governments manipulate the money supply for political reasons." That's the power hungry part I'm talking about. The government is not some machine that is broken, it's a select group of people within our society running around trying to balance appeasing the public horde while trying to amass as much power as possible. The behaviour of the people within government is a reflection of the state and quality…
So how would you fix this problem?
How is not relevant. What's relevant is that society has to change to the point where it becomes possible and also a priority. I do believe, unfortunately[1], that the money system has to collapse first.
1. unfortunately in the sense that some hardship will follow suit.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
False. BI would not provide increases to science nor art. It would dilute them. I get enough emails as it is from whacko's who think they've upturned Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, or created some perpetual motion machine. If society valued these people's output they would be financially rewarded already. There's already incentives in present society, called capitalism and competition! There's a reason why only a tin…
>I get enough emails as it is from whacko's who think they've upturned Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, or created some perpetual motion machine. If society valued these people's output they would be financially rewarded already. There's already incentives in present society, called capitalism and competition! If you can't differentiate between capitalism and scientific peer-review as separate processes for separating…
Competition underlies capitalism.
Why do you think scientists want to publish in the best journals like science and nature? There is a healthy amount of competition in science too. It's what drives people to get into the academy, or get awards like the Nobel. It's what creates great science, but it also creates politics in research.
There's a number of parallels between capitalism and academic research.